Cleveland school board considers sponsoring five more charter schools

View full sizeThomas Ondrey l The Plain DealerA class of kindergartners listens intently to instruction at Citizens Academy last May in Cleveland. Cleveland School District is considering sponsoring more charter schools.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland School District is sticking mostly with known commodities as it moves to sponsor more charter schools.

The school board is to vote March 8 on sponsoring three additional charters. The district also is poised to sign preliminary agreements with two other charter schools.

All five are affiliated with Breakthrough Schools, a Cleveland nonprofit management group that already has ties to the district. The district rejected six applications.

Cleveland now sponsors three Breakthrough schools: Entrepreneurship Preparatory, which is a middle school, and two elementary schools: Citizens Academy and Village Preparatory. The district operates a fourth charter, Promise Academy, a dropout recovery and prevention program for ages 16 to 21.

Another Breakthrough elementary, the Intergenerational School, will switch its sponsorship to Cleveland if the school board gives the go-ahead March 8. In addition, Breakthrough would open a middle school and an elementary school this year and an elementary school and a middle school in 2012.

District officials will consider letting the charters share or lease closed schools. The charters would probably pay little or no rent but take responsibility for maintenance and utilities.

The district is following systems like New York and Chicago that promote publicly funded, privately managed charters as options.

Many Cleveland families have made clear that they will take the option, district-sanctioned or not.

About 13,000 students who live in the district go to charters, taking with them more than $100 million in aid. If all those students transferred to the Cleveland system, the enrollment of about 45,000 would swell by more than 25 percent.

Ohio districts can count their charters' test scores as their own, but charter students are not included in district enrollment counts and state aid calculations. Cleveland's charters would not receive local tax money unless the board approves.

The Cleveland Teachers Union has pledged to organize the schools. CTU President David Quolke criticized district officials for not discussing their plans with the union.

"We'd rather be a partner to see if we can find common ground where these would be our teachers, our members," Quolke said. "They're fighting us every step of the way around charter schools."

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